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Automated Alice by Jeff Noon (Doubleday, 1996, 252p, £14.99)

It's a big risk, tangling with the most famous little girl in literature, but for Jeff Noon it is a savvy move, for more than one reviewer of his previous novels, Vurt and Pollen, has noted their Alice-in Wonderland-on-methamphetamine quality. The title of his third novel echoes, of course, The Annotated Alice, the omnibus of the two Alice novels edited and comprehensively annotated by Martin Gardner; appropriately enough, for Automated Alice it is not, as it claims, a true sequel (or to use Noon's terminology, a trequel) to Lewis Carroll's novels. For while (to take one example of a slew of Alice-by-other-hands) Gilbert Adair's Alice through the Needle's Eye: A Third Adventure for Lewis Carroll's "Alice" (1984) took Alice into through an entirely new alphabetical sequence of adventures in a third wonderland, Automated Alice parodies episodes from both Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by transposing them in a fantastical dystopian 1998 Manchester that bears some resemblance to the Manchester of Vurt and Pollen. That should not detract, however, from Noon's fast-moving and highly inventive book.

On holiday with her Great Aunt Ermintrude and Great Uncle Mortimer in Manchester, Alice tires of her jigsaw puzzle (which she is unable to complete because pieces are missing) and sets loose her great-aunt's parrot, which flies into the workings of the grandfather clock and disappears, leaving behind only a feather (as in Vurt, feathers are important talismans -- in a later chapter, people use feathers to enter into a kind of interactive vurt-like dreaming at the Palace of Chimera). Alice follows and finds herself in the future, where Manchester is populated by human/animal hybrids caused by a plague of newmonia, and tyrannised by the Civil Serpents, who hate disorder of any kind.

In order to return to her own time, Alice must catch the parrot and find the missing jigsaw pieces, several of which are left by the bodies of victims of the Jigsaw Murderer. This lends Automated Alice a rigour somewhat lacking in Noon's previous novels, although the plot is somewhat at odds with the tone of the original books, which were informed by Alice's enquiring innocence rather than the helter-skelter contingency of a thriller quest. However, Noon's inventiveness is infectiously buoyant, and carries all before it.

Alice passes through a computermite mound, where the scurrying of millions of termites perform calculations, meets her automated doppleganger whose artificial intelligence is the result of an infestation of billions of very tiny computermites, is implicated in the Jigsaw Murders and thrown into jail with a snail version of Miles Davis, freed, meets Noon's fictional twin, Zenith O'Clock (who in a fit of chutzpa is described as the most human of the characters she meets), locates the book which explains her predicament, meets the ghost of Lewis Carroll, and confronts the chief of the Civil Serpents. It is a helter-skelter of alarums and excursions, chases and escapes and (of all things) a shootout, with references to (amongst others) the White Rabbit, the Cheshire Cat, the Caterpillar, the White Knight, and ending with a question that echoes that which ends Through the Looking Glass.

All very enjoyable, although it is not a very deep book. Lewis Carroll (or rather, Charles Dodgson) was a mathematician and logician of great skill; although frequent interjections are placed in the text to give the appearance that Carroll wrote Automated Alice, one feels he would have made rather more of the paradoxes and puzzles thrown up by computer technology and quantum mechanics. Noon has a felicitous ear and most of his language twisting puns and routines chime nicely, but while there are playful references to computing, genetic engineering and quantum mechanics, little is made of them. Unlike Carroll's Alice books, the philosophical problems are decorations which are appended to rather than being at the core of the plot. And this is a pity, because Noon's depictions of such curiosities as a wurm which when swallowed randomises thoughts or a library with a very strange way of indexing its books are both smart and ingenious. One would have preferred more of this and rather less of the very unAlice-like mundane chase through a conspiracy plot.

Oh dear. I sound very much like one of the Crickets which Zenith O'Clock complains are infesting him, rubbing my dry wings together and making an altogether terrible respond to his Friction. I'll end my song here. Short and zippy, furnished with nicely rendered pen-and-ink illustrations, Automated Alice is great entertainment and lots of fun, but it does not linger. WYSIWYG, as computer programmers have it. What You See Is What You Get. Good enough?

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